How Google AMP Can Help Your Business (A Beginner’s Guide)

There’s been a lot of hype around Google AMP, and you may be feeling a little lost as to why it’s such a big deal, and whether it will benefit your business or not. What’s the bottom line – should you worry about it, or not?

Google AMP isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for business websites (yet). In order to determine whether it’s right for you, you’ll need to analyze when it’s important and sensible to implement it into your online strategy.

So today, you’ll be learning how to identify what makes Google AMP such a powerful project, and whether it’s appropriate to use in your business.

A Brief Introduction to Google AMP

Let’s get the basics out of the way: AMP stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages”.

How long has Google been itching to get on top of mobile? Well, they first began focusing on the value and importance of mobile traffic at Zero Moment of Truth back in 2011. They currently report that 82% of smartphone users turn to their phone to influence a purchase decision—while in a physical store!

Mobile SEO and the Future of Google AMP

As we said at the beginning, Google AMP is not necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution for businesses. However, it’s important to consider how it may eventually play into your SEO rankings before deciding to wait and see what happens with the project.

You can start by establishing how mobile-friendly Google already thinks your website is. They offer a tool that makes it easy to test.

Right now, mobile content is served one of three ways:

Responsive design offers the same HTML and CSS content and website to all users, but the user interface adjusts based on the size of the screen it displays on.

Dynamic serving does its best to detect the device being used, and serves a different version of HTML and CSS to different devices.

Separate URLs means there are two live versions of the site, and you can access them by visiting their completely separate web addresses.

For the time being, those three avenues are the only ones ranked for SEO – not Google AMP. However, you can already see how Google is testing out the prioritization of AMP content at g.co/ampdemo.

With mobile-friendly already factoring into SEO, imagine how much more mobile-friendly Google AMP will be considered once the project has become more widespread! Even if Google never specifically singles out Google AMP content, it would not come as a surprise if it organically rises to the top, since it loads so quickly.

Getting Started With AMP for Business

Now comes the real question: Is Google AMP right for your business?

Currently, Google AMP is easy to install on WordPress. Unfortunately, it only impacts blog posts at the moment.

Let’s make this a little more clear. If you run your site with WordPress and run a content marketing strategy with consistently fresh content, you have no excuse not to get started with Google AMP right now! On the other hand, if your site was ranked as not mobile-friendly, you may consider jumping on board regardless of your business blogging habits.

If you don’t run a content marketing strategy, or would run into other difficulties getting Google AMP set up, it’s probably just fine to wait it out until the project has matured a bit more. That said, do keep a watchful eye on how things progress.

Installing and Optimizing Google AMP

Getting Google AMP up and running with WordPress is fairly straightforward with Automattic’s aptly named AMP plugin for WordPress.

But, what about those potential SEO benefits? Even regardless of whether SEO plays a role now, you probably want your customized titles and descriptions to show up the same on your Google AMP pages as your regular ones. You can easily integrate that with Yoast SEO by using the Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP sidekick plugin.

Right now, AMP is a bit of a developer’s game, as most of the content provided by Google is directed at those who know their way around at least a little bit of HTML code.

If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and really delve into what’s possible with Google AMP, you might benefit from these technically inclined articles for further reading:

Conclusion

Even though the Google AMP project has been mostly aimed at developers for integration, the effects of its implementation will largely impact the content creators of the web. How can you know whether Google AMP is right for your business?

By understanding the driving motive behind the AMP project, knowing its core strengths, and considering its implications for SEO moving forward, you can confidently make the decision whether to move forward and add it into your business content marketing strategy.

What questions do you still have about Google’s AMP? Give us your thoughts and concerns in the comments section below, so we can help you better determine whether AMP is a good fit for your business!

You May Also Like

Solomon Thimothy is the Co-founder of Clickx. With clients internationally, Clickx helps businesses gain better visibility online by focusing on more exposure, more traffic and more leads. Follow him on twitter @sthimothy

Join 10,000+ subscribers and receive a new article each week!

Comments

Check out how we're helping customers succeed!

Erin HodgesDirector of Marketing – DecisionPoint Systems

Team at Clickx is highly organized, efficient, and attentive to our marketing needs. I have worked with them for several years now. They have been a tremendous asset to our company’s success. With us having a lot of last minute campaigns, they ensure the highest quality work regardless of time constrains.